Linking .a libs with MSVC

From: Kirill Lapshin (gclbb-jamboost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-06-29 15:13:04

Hi All,

I have a need to link .a library with msvc, however boost.build silently 
replaces library extension to .lib. It's an external precompiled library 
explicetly configured with <name>yaddada/foobar.a, I am running windows 
verion of bjam with M4 boost.build.

It is not very common use case, but it is not as rare as one might 
assume. For instance those who use boost.ublas might want to take 
advantage of ublas bindings to use ATLAS and Lapack routines on ublas 
matrices. The typical usage of ATLAS on windows is to compile it with 
gcc and link resulting atlas.a file to msvc compiled code.

I tried to find offending jam code but did not have much luck. It's 
quite hard to grep for 'lib' or 'a'. There are couple of places wich 
look suspicios:

new/builtin.jam: 
"$(LIBRARY_OPTION)$(FINDLIBS_ST:S=.lib)"
new/builtin.jam: 
"$(LIBRARY_OPTION)$(FINDLIBS_SA:S=.lib)"
tools/msvc.jam: $(.LD) $(LINKFLAGS) /out:"$(<[1]:W)" 
$(.implib)"$(<[2]:W)" /LIBPATH:"$(LINKPATH:W
)" "$(FINDLIBS:S=.lib)" $(USER_LINKFLAGS) @"$(>:W)"

but removing extension substitution in there did not help. Could someone 
shed some light on it, please?

--Kirill